The question at the heart of this book—what really happened on the way home from a high school party, and how four characters grapple with the fallout—touches issues that feel so timely and topical in the post-2016 election, post #MeToo era. But you actually began writing TRUE STORY in 2015. What compelled you to write this novel, and how do you see it resonating with our current moment?
I’ve been angry for a long time about the ways credible allegations of sexual assault get silenced, twisted, and manipulated into blame for the victim. During my senior year of college, for example, there was a spate of rapes reported on campus in a few short months, and it sparked a toxic debate about the victims’ credibility. When charges in one of the rape cases were dropped, due to a lack of evidence, someone anonymously covered the campus in flyers that revealed the victim’s name and called her a liar: “I know what you did last semester. Care to revise your statement?” TRUE STORY was inspired in part by my frustration with people like that, who believe false accusations are a bigger problem than rape (and who use lame movie references to make their point).
Now, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, it’s especially exciting to publish this book because more people (especially men) are opening their minds to the reality of rape culture and the scope of the problem. But I’m also nervous that the ongoing backlash to #MeToo could set us back; because there’s a conception that it is now “easier” for victims to come forward, there are new risks of being disbelieved and shamed. I hope TRUE STORY is part of conversations that help dismantle preconceived notions about men and women and keep pushing the work of #MeToo forward.
You worked as a ghostwriter for 10 years, and ghostwriting plays a key role in your book. How did that influence your work as a novelist, and why did you choose this career for Alice?
I loved being a ghostwriter. I know some writers prefer to use a different part of their brain in their day job, but I’ve always seen my freelance work as cross-training for my fiction. Ghostwriting has made me a more flexible ventriloquist and expanded my range of voice and character. As a craft, it also made me interested in the ways that we all refine and polish our personal stories for public consumption—which is a big theme in TRUE STORY.
For Alice, who has always wanted to be a writer, ghostwriting is a way to make a living within the safety of telling other people’s stories. Her voice has been silenced in multiple ways throughout her life, and in some ways her choice of this career path is another kind of silence. But importantly, Alice’s success as a ghostwriter is also a testament to her talent, showing that she is able to convincingly tell stories from other people’s perspectives, which becomes important later on.
Your book takes a deep dive into the mind of Nick, a high school lacrosse player. Nick and his teammates embody toxic masculinity and white male privilege, yet Nick is depicted with great nuance and sensitivity. How did you tap into the ethos of this group of young men? And how do you feel Nick differs from the bunch?
I was SO surprised when I found myself writing in Nick’s voice! Nick is the kind of guy that terrifies me—he’s the embodiment of “locker room talk.” But, to my dismay, it turned out that channeling the groupthink and masculine norms that guide Nick’s life came fairly naturally, probably because those norms have been so well-covered by the books and movies I grew up with.
I was also surprised by how much affection I developed for Nick. Originally, he had so much airtime in the book because I wanted to explore the role that bystanders play in toxic environments; the way that Nick starts to wrestle with his own responsibility reflects what I think our society is starting to do now, in the wake of #MeToo. In the end, I feel tenderly toward Nick because he’s trying, although he’s a difficult character to defend on paper. And I’m not sure he differs that much from the bunch—he would like to think that he is different, and he’s very good at justifying his actions to himself, but ultimately I wouldn’t call him a good guy. At least not yet! But he is learning!
TRUE STORY is a novel that defies genre. It is part literary fiction, part noir thriller, part horror, and spliced through with “found documents” like screenplays and drafts of a college admissions essay. Can you talk about the role that form plays in the novel?
You can interpret a lot of different meanings in how TRUE STORY plays with structure and genre. One simple answer is that the book mirrors the way rumors about sexual assault are often presented, pieced together, and evaluated in the public narrative. For example, I was stunned when Brett Kavanaugh produced his high school calendar as “evidence” of his own innocence; it felt eerily like something that would have happened in TRUE STORY.
Also, I just love genre fiction, and I wanted TRUE STORY to be that compulsively readable. Playing with the narrative and structure let me steal a bunch of the juicy tricks that make the best genre books so magnetic.
One of the main characters, Alice, uses horror movies to process her trauma, and TRUE STORY incorporates different horror elements into the story. What attracts you to the horror genre? How does horror operate as a coping mechanism?
I’m drawn to horror movies and also terrified of them. I’m a total fraidy cat. I’m usually a nervous wreck walking into a theater, but once the movie starts, it’s exhilarating. Watching a horror movie is such a physical, visceral experience. It’s obviously not for everyone, but for Alice, it’s a deeply satisfying catharsis to face a stylized, over-the-top version of fear while knowing that it’s just a movie.
I’m also interested in horror because it’s a genre that is sanctioned “for men” but that has so much space for women characters with rich emotional lives. There are so many horror movies from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s pass the Bechdel test, for example. For all the overt misogyny that exists in horror, there are also many serious and subversive explorations of gender and sexual politics.
One book that influenced my thinking on this is “Men, Women and Chainsaws.” In it, Carol Clover coins the term “Final Girl,” which is the single female character who fights her way to survival at the end of a slasher film (à la Jamie Lee Curtis in the Halloween movies). Clover argues that horror films invite male audiences to identify with the Final Girl’s pain and suffering, because most of the shots are from the POV of the victim, looking at the monster; Clover says horror is a way for young men to experience a masochistic fantasy of suffering by identifying with the victim without threatening their masculinity. Those horror movies don’t have an explicit feminist mission—the Final Girl is usually just a cipher—but in writing TRUE STORY, and thinking about how to get through to men, I was attracted to the idea of horror as a Trojan horse that could sneak in empathy and understanding for women’s experiences.
A portion of TRUE STORY is made up of short movie scripts written by two characters in middle school. Do you have a background in filmmaking or screenwriting?
My older brother, JT Petty, is a director and screenwriter; when we were kids, I used to act in the horror movies he made on our dad’s camcorder. Those home movies were some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life, and they’re the inspiration behind the home movies in the book.
Screenwriting is such a fun and precise art form, and I really enjoy it. JT and I wrote a screenplay together that has attracted some interest—Simon Pegg and J.K. Simmons have signed on to star in the film—called My Only Sunshine. It’s a bank heist story, inspired by “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” where a married couple robs a bank then gets into a vicious, marriage-ending fight while holding everyone hostage. It also has a dramatic, genre-bending plot twist, which makes it kin to TRUE STORY.
Truth is malleable in your book, constantly shifting and evolving depending on the perspective of each chapter. How do you define the nature of truth in the book and its relationship to power – and to the question of who gets to tell the story, and why?
This is a difficult question to answer, but one thing I’ve been thinking about lately is Rashomon, the classic film told through multiple people’s perspectives, which is about the essential unreliability of eyewitnesses. The point of that movie is well-made, but I think TRUE STORY is the opposite of Rashomon. While TRUE STORY challenges readers to question what is “real” and “true” throughout the book, it lands on an answer at the end, and ultimately reaffirms the possibility of finding the truth. This was important to me, because I wanted the book to defy the modern version of Rashomon, which is too often a “he said, she said” story.
“He said, she said” is a defeatist genre that lets justice off the hook, because we can never know what really happened. The structure of this kind of story creates the impression that we’re hearing different perspectives on equal footing. But there’s usually an inherent power imbalance. If it’s the word of a woman against that of a man, for example, her side of the story is dragged down by generations of myths and pop culture tropes about the motivations and inherent untrustworthiness of women. Calling it “he said, she said” disguises the unfairness of the storytelling exercise.
And this is especially important now, because that blueprint is being applied across the political landscape—the idea of listening to “both sides” has been weaponized to give voice to hate speech and extremist points of view. As a country, we have to do a better job of recognizing bias, because we’re not yet very good at truly and fairly listening to the testimonies of people who are speaking out from positions of less power against those with more power.
TRUE STORY is your debut novel. What was your writing process like? How do you feel about having it out in the world?
I spent the whole time I was writing this book telling myself I was crazy. I didn’t think anyone would ever want to read such a crazy book. I kept writing at first because I was enjoying it so much; later on, when I got to the point where I worried I’d had too much fun and there were too many different voices and twists, I kept writing because I wanted to prove to myself that I could pull it off. My plan was always to finish the book, put it away, and then write a normal book that I could publish.
I finished a first draft in 2017 and shared it with some friends, who—hooray!—liked it. At that point, I started a long process of editing; the basic construction of the book hasn’t changed, and the voices are largely the same, but it took a lot of thinking (and wonderful editorial guidance) to get all of the loose corners tucked in.
What do you hope readers will take away from TRUE STORY?
I hope the experience of reading TRUE STORY is first and foremost a delight. I hope it’s the kind of book you can’t put down. But I also hope the story is something readers thinking about, and that people want to talk about, for a long time afterwards.